Wearing Different HATs

If you’re a Raspberry Pi fan, you already got the joke. If not, well…… a HAT for a Raspberry Pi is Hardware Attached to Top. Get it? OK, it’s geeky humor…

Anyway, I just got three brand-new HATs to play with: the Pimoroni Skywriter HAT, the Piano HAT, and an LCD touchscreen (Pi-size). I’ve only had the chance to play a bit with the Skywriter, which has near-field 3D gesture detection (think I got that right), and I’m dying to get that X-Wing built in Minecraft and then fly it by hand gestures above the HAT. I spent about an hour, getting the Skywriter library, trying to use some code (here’s the project: http://robotsandphysicalcomputing.blogspot.com/2016/01/guesture-controlled-minecraft-x-wing.html), finding it needs an extra Minecraft Pi library called minecraftstuff, figuring out where the minecraft api on the Jessie distro is…. so I’m still grounded. However, we’ll be taking off next week for sure!

The Piano HAT allows you to “play” the piano on your Pi. The really cool thing is that you can do all kinds of music with it, but you can also code the keys to do anything else you want — make weird noises, turn lights on and off, turn motors on and off…. Can’t wait to play with that one!

And the LCD screen frees you from a monitor and keyboard for your Pi. I personally find it just too tiny for my eyeballs, but I can see it working with an embedded Pi doing all kinds of cool things — retro gaming, a DJ system….

Did I mention I’m also diving into using Sonic Pi (live music coding) in Minecraft? The Sonic Pi api includes some Minecraft stuff (written in Ruby), so you can lay down some beats with Sonic Pi, then build stuff as you move around in Minecraft, synchronized together! It’s just too cool for words.

So I’m getting ready for next year’s classes when we move much of my curriculum over to the Raspberry Pi. Look out!